Week 44/2025

This week is Halloween inspired. The films I’ve chosen are all about transformations, evoked using animatronics, puppets, masks, prostheses and lots of slime.

When Roald Dahl released his book The Witches in 1983, puppeteer master Jim Henson bought the rights and hired a rather unusual choice of director to shoot the film. Nicolas Roeg, known for his experimental, sensual and disturbing films, accepted the task of making a film for children. In The Witches, a little boy eavesdrops during a gathering of the so-called “Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children”, which turns out to be a confederacy of witches who plot to turn all children into mice.

In The Thing by John Carpenter, researchers on Antarctica discover an alien entity that can take the shape of every living being, consuming the flesh from the inside, filling the skin of its victim as if being taxidermized. Lacan wrote of the “horrendous discovery” made in the film, “that of the flesh one never sees [...], the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as form in itself is something which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, identification of anxiety, the final revelation of you are this – You are this, which is so far from you, this which is the ultimate formlessness.”

The third film of the selection is Jaws by Steven Spielberg. Antonia Quirke wrote of the film that passing by the shark’s jaws is a topological description of the afterlife, “a portal at which you stare and stare to discern the other side of life.” And Serge Daney questioned: “Who is the shark? Nothing more than the actualisation – from a hallucination – that there is something rotten inside which attracts the fish.”

When not in the cinema this week, I invite you to dive into Sabzian’s Film Index to discover our selected quotes on film.